I don’t mean seeing a band in a bar (where there’s all kinds of distractions you’re probably focused on), or listening at work or while driving, or kicking up the surround sound when a Dolby sound movie comes on the TV. I mean, sitting still, without trying to accomplish or be 17 other things, without conversation, without dishes to wash. Seems to me that if you consider yourself a music lover, or more to the point call yourself a musician, and don’t spend at least some dedicated portion every day to just listening to music, then it probably takes you longer and longer to get “into it” each time you put it on or play it.

By denigrating music as a soundtrack to more important things, we lose the beauty and magic of music as it truly is — an art for art’s sake, with no tangible benefit other than perhaps temporary change of mood.

Makes music seem more worth doing, because it NEEDS to be done. It is not a sideline, an afterthought or a minor player.

Music is the fabric that defines a culture, makes it technology and achievements worth celebrating, learning, remembering and passing on. Without it, we are left with only philosophies of how to do, and none to tell us why.

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Listen in the dark, and follow
where my voice leads on, away,
through the woods beyond the hollow
where the cheerful sparrows play
on into the mist that thickens
where the Spanish moss hangs low
on the spreading live oak branches
as we pass, silent, below.

Here the sun makes no impression,
for the canopy is thick;
mossy roots criss-cross the pathway,
mute our footsteps; here, the trick
is to remember without seeing,
gauge by sense of smell and touch,
so that if you feel like fleeing,
you cannot reveal too much.

Listen, can you hear the whisper
of the almost stagnant breeze,
like the faintly fading flicker
of a hair bent on your knee?
Your own breathing now is heavy,
louder than the crunch of leaves,
than the slow lap of the levee
echoing the distant seas.

Listen in the dark, and follow
where my voice is almost gone;
feel your face find the cool hollow
in the air it lingers on.
Listen for the fading footsteps
that leave no trace on the ground,
only soft and silent shadows,
memories lost to sylvan sound.

23 JUL 2005

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The voice you hear is not my voice; lost in the sound of your own making,
these words were new-forged long before the human throat began to hum,
and then began to form the shapes of bringing-into-being charms.

Before the echo of that utter, in the silence between seconds
where the space of breath expands beyond time and being
these words lived aeons and grew old awaiting tongues to speak their names.

The voice you hear is not my voice; it is the sound that throbs beneath
a single raindrop’s spattering. It is your voice I hear;
and yet you have not mouth or tongue, nor one sigh’s force to use.